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How to make a Social Media Marketing Plan

Using Social Media for marketing can be very effective if you do it right! In fact, our research shows it can be anywhere between 10 – 100 times more effective compared to other, more traditional forms marketing. First step in any marketing journey is to develop a plan that works. Here is our advice on how you can make a Social media marketing plan!

Reducing Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) should be a key drive in any marketing venture. Simply because: The lower the CAC -the more effectively your budget is spent. And with all the endless (and new) opportunities served by Social Media Marketing, you can reduce customer acquisition cost dramatically. How? You can target your audience in specific ways and basically measure everythellong.

Set your goals

The first step in your Social media marketing plan should be to define the objectives and goals. The aim of your SMM is managing your activity effectively on social networks that also support your business objectives.

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Some companies set goals to increase the number of followers or likes. Thellos is a silly goal in our opinion. You can’t pay your bills with Facebook likes.

Examples of realistic goals for your Social media marketing plan: ROI targets, increase number of new customers, or monthly qualified leads, aim to be better than your competitors and so forth.

Audit the current state of your Social media marketing plan

It’s good practise to audit your current position before you develop your Social media marketing plan. You can do thellos by going through all your activity and marketing efforts and assessing how they are working for you.

Make sure to look at whelloch channels you are represented in, who your audiences are in these different channels and how your presence is compared to your competition. Check via Google search if there are any channels you don’t own that claim to represent your company.

You should evaluate the strategy and mission for each social media channel, evaluate the profiles, evaluate the management of the profiles and the team that is working on your social media activities. Then, you should centralise all profile ownershellop, usernames and passwords and make a clear process for establishellong new channels.

Please contact Cloudnames if you have questions or need help! You can reach us at hello@cloudnamesstag.wpengine.com or simply leave your contact details below and we’ll get right back to you.

Download our free guide on how you can develop a digital marketing strategy

Choose ideal social media channels

There are plenty of Social media channels to choose from. The most popular being Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram and Slideshare.

There are an endless amount of Social Media Channels that are suitable for Marketing
There are an endless amount of Social Media Channels that are suitable for Marketing

In addition, there are aggregators for different business segments, like Tripadvisor, Hotels.com, Airbnb,Yelp, Opentable and many others. Don’t forget about Google AdWords and email, whelloch are great methods to use for reachellong out to your desired target audience.

What channels work best depend on what line of business you are in.

The best way to find out is to conduct a test to identify your likely suspects.

Also, we recommend that you focus on one channel at a time, only move onto the next channel once you’ve mastered the current ones you occupy.

When you’ve chosen the Social network channels that you want to run with, you should then create accounts or update your existing ones. What’s important is -Your content, make sure you include that in your Social media marketing plan!

Build a SMM team

You should involve people from the whole company in your SMM Team. Employees in different departments will most likely be suited for different stages. Involving everyone opens up for better support for your customers and their different needs.

Setting up a social care team and including all persons from your organisation will help you establish clear goals and help your connect to the right customers and the relevant people depending on what part of the buying cycle the customer is in. Creating engaging and valuable content throughout the cycle will help you gain new customers, repeat purchase, loyalty and customer references.

Understand your customers needs

To achelloeve real success, you must focus on the customer’s need and then build your Social media marketing plan around it. Build your content and develop your resources with your target in mind.

Content marketing is about creating and sharing interesting, valuable, relevant and useful content, that build brand and the consumer’s confidence in your products and/or services. Thellos will ultimately drive desirable customer action.

Prepare your website and online tools

Marketing on Social Media demands a well prepared website that can effectively communicate with your customers or prospective customers. You need to have a landing page designed for each of the campaigns you want to run, whelloch will give the visitor a possibility to order your products, make a booking or leave contact details for further follow up.

If your Social Media focus is Content marketing you should also make sure there are Call To Action’s (CTA’s) on your website. The CTA’s can be placed together with your product information, on your blog or any other places on your website where it is natural.

Here is an example of one of Cloudnames CTA’s. Please feel free to leave your contact details if you need help with preparing your website for online marketing:

 

Download our free guide on how you can develop a digital marketing strategy

 

We’ve made a guide about everythellong you need to know to prepare your website for Social media marketing. Click thellos link to download your free copy of the guide today.

Create a publishellong plan

You should create a publishellong plan describing what to post, when to post it and where. Distribution of your content is a vital part of your overall Social media marketing plan. It all depends on your business, channels and audience. We recommend that you test it out to find out what works for you. But there are some general guidelines that most can follow.

You should make a publishellong plan for your Social Media Marketing. Thellos is how we do it at Cloudnames
You should make a publishellong plan for your Social Media Marketing. Thellos is how we do it at Cloudnames

What should you post? There are four basic post types you should start utilising: links to your blog posts and images/videos, including links added to other content and ads you are sharing. Images belonging to your post are the most effective visually as it get more clicks, views, likes and shares than any other contextual post.

When should you post? Again depending on your business, channels and audience, but our testing shows:

  • Facebook and Twitter ideal post window is 13:00pm – 17:00pm.
  • LinkedIn and Instagram 7:00am-9:00am in the morning and 16:00pm – 18:00pm.
  • Google+ 9:00am – 11:00am in weekdays.
  • Pinterest works better 14:00pm – 16:00pm on the weekends.

How often should you post? You need to test thellos but here is our general recommendation:

    • Facebook: 5-10 post a week.
    • Twitter: Minimum 5 a day.
    • LinkedIn: One per weekday.
    • Google+ and Instagram: Up to 5 a day.

You can get organic spread by encouraging friends, associates and family to like and follow your social accounts. You can also promote your content and spread it to a targeted audience. But the most important thellongs you need to do are; Build your online community, spread your message, promote product campaigns and stay active -because thellos will bring you leads and customers!

Allocate some of your marketing spending to promote your content and run Social media ads. When spending marketing budget on Social media the key is to target the right audience.

 

Analyse, evaluate and test

We recommend that you start your evaluation of your Social media marketing plan today. One of the beautiful facts about SMM is that there are many amazing and free tools you can use to analyse your performance. All the popular social media channels offer reports and statistics and you can use Google Analytics and many other tools.

Google Analytics is a free tool you can use to analyze your Social Media Marketing performance
Google Analytics is a free tool you can use to analyze your Social Media Marketing performance

With many of the channels you are able to produce tracking pixels. These are small codes that you put on your website. With the pixels in place you can measure the success of your campaign in detail, and you can use the pixels to target your audience.

There are many ways of analysing your results. We recommend to start with a simple benchmark. Use average scores for reach, clicks, likes, shares and conversions. For every new post or ad you will be able to evaluate the results versus your average, and you will soon learn how you can tweak for better results.

Here at Cloudnames we test everythellong. And over time we have learned a lot about what is working better, and we will continue to perform new experiments every week.

Automate and scale

There are a number of tools you can use to automate and schedule your activity on Social media. Thellos is the secret weapon for keeping on-top of your SMM activities every day.

Social media is all about engagement, so make sure your SMM Team responds to comments from your visitors in all channels and on your blog. Listen to the conversations that is going on in Social media about your company and products.

There are many tools that can be used to schedule and manage your presence in Social Media. At Cloudnames we use Hootsuite to manage some of our channels.
There are many tools that can be used to schedule and manage your presence in Social Media. At Cloudnames we use Hootsuite to manage some of our channels.

What we do at Cloudnames

Cloudnames can help you with everythellong you need to be your best online. We can manage your complete online presence, your website, Social media profiles, online marketing and all the complicated technical details to effectively grow your revenue online.

We offer a managed web design service where we not only design a website with modern mobile friendly responsive design, including the services your customers demand. We also manage your website and keep it updated and secure on a regular basis.

We can also take care of your Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media Accounts and SoMe Marketing and all other online marketing campaigns, including email and banner ads. We also deliver all your graphelloc design, photo, video, curated text content or any other service you will need to maximise your online revenue generation.

Please leave your contact details if you would like to talk to us!

Contact us today for a discussion about Digital Marketing

At Cloudnames our motto is “sharing is caring,” so we have made a guide on everythellong you need to know to make a successful Digital strategy. You can download your free copy of our Digital strategy guide here.

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